Fernie’s Shred Kelly enjoying life on the road

By Al Beeber on July 15, 2021.

Photo courtesy of Matt Kuhn Shred Kelly plays the Owl Acoustic Lounge Saturday.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

Fernie alternative folk rockers Shred Kelly are back on the road and belatedly celebrating the release of their latest album.
The band plays the Owl Acoustic Lounge on Saturday in an all-ages show with doors opening at 7:30 p.m. The Owl is located at 411 3 Avenue South.
The five-member band’s fifth album, “Like A Rising Sun,” was actually written in 2019, the same year Tim Newton and Sage McBride became parents and Newton lost his father.
“The joy, sadness and uncertainty of that time allowed for a new lease on their highly energetic music and the stories they tell. The album is woven together in the immediate aftermath with themes of love, life, death, fear for the future, and new beginnings,” says a press release.
Parenting has impacted the way the band travels, said McBride in a telephone interview this week. She and Newton are the main songwriters and singers in Shred Kelly, which also includes Jordan Vlasschaert, Ty West and Ryan Mildenberrger.
Now when they travel they have to expect their two-and-a-half-year-old girl to want to do a little unwinding and exploring even after they get to their hotel late at night. They’ve dropped from 10-hour road trips to about four or at maximum six with the new member of the family along and take two vehicles on tour, said McBride, whose band also plays Calgary on Friday at Ill-Fated Customs, 5327 3 St. SE.
Being on the road again is a great feeling, she said.
“It feels amazing. I feel like everyone has a new appreciation for live music. It seems like everyone is extra excited and appreciative and emotional about it. So it’s a really special time to be touring,” said McBride.
McBride and Newton have been touring with their daughter since she was a newborn and bring a nanny along to help with childcare.
Being a mom “makes things way more challenging. Every tour is kind of like planning out child care and planning out meals because she only eats certain things then planning out accommodations so if we arrive late at night at the hotel, which we used to sometimes do after a show, we’re now realizing she likes to explore new things for a little while so you can’t just show up at a hotel and go to sleep.
“We toured with her when she was a newborn, so of course we didn’t have that element when she was just born; we could just show up at a place.
“We have a tour nanny on the road who is just wonderful so it’s definitely working.”
Until COVID hit, Shred Kelly based tours around album releases but that changed in 2020.
“This is kind of the belated album release tour because we never really got to tour it and for us, the way our career has been structured is all of our releases, the way we release albums, is primarily built around a tour.”
The band hasn’t focused on having a heavy digital presence in the past but “that’s definitely changed over the past year. Touring was always our way of getting the music out there so it was pretty strange for us to not be able to tour the record at the time of the release. But it feels really good to be playing the songs now,” McBride said.
The show Saturday will feature selections from the new album as well as cuts from Shred Kelly’s previous works, McBride said.
“Our set is like an hour and 15 minutes to an hour and a half so we’ll play half the new record and a bunch of classic old favourites, too. So there’ll be a good mix.
“This is an all-ages show which we haven’t done a lot of in Lethbridge so the doors are open earlier at 7:30 and the show will be over by 10.”
The Lethbridge show is one of 15 dates the band is playing in 24 days. After taking August off, they’ll be back on the road in the fall. They’re also supposed to go to Germany in November, which is dependent on whether COVID restrictions allow that to happen.
Shred Kelly promoted a lot of their shows on the current tour themselves.
“We had actually planned this back in the spring; we were just going to plan a tiny concert tour. A lot of the shows this tour, except for this weekend, we promoted ourselves because we just weren’t sure if live music was going to happen. So we found outdoor spaces and put them on in fields and things like that.”
The band is also working on some new music.
“We’re planning to do a deluxe version of the album in the fall at some point, just adding a few more songs to this album and then after that, we’ll start working on a full new release. We’re also thinking of doing a live recording at some point over some of the next shows. Whether it’s taken from the entire tour or just one set of shows, we’ve never done a live recording before but we love playing live so we think that would be fun to release in the next little while, too,” McBride said.

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